Kevin Roberts

It's going to take a generation to fix.

We, for people who are interested, we just published what we call a landmark paper, long, long social science study

on family policy and people know the diagnosis well, their cultural, economic,

religious, social factors that go into this.

But what we're saying in this bottom line is while those need to change, and I'll come back to a couple of them that I think in particular need to change, there may also be a role for federal and state policy.

And so we have proposed, even as a conservative organization, that you invert some of the existing policies in federal law that disincentivize marriage and probably disincentivize the birth rate and actually incentivize young Americans before the age of 30 to get married and to have children.

We're saying, to be clear, though, that's downstream from some bigger factors, what's going on culturally and economically.

And just like you say to young people you encounter, get married, have a lot of children, our institutions, which are upstream of the institution of the federal government, have to do a better job of cultivating among Americans the desire to be married and to have children.

Our religious institutions, our other cultural institutions.

And so these things have to occur in tandem.

The good news is...

While the data is admittedly mixed in some cases, in some countries that have done this, particularly Hungary and Israel, there have been modest improvements in the marriage and birth rates.

And so we at Heritage are sober about the timeline we think that it will take to reverse this, a generation, 20 or 25 years.

But we believe we're not yet at the point of no return, although probably there are some societies in the West that are.

I want to be abusive and help this multiple choice and add a sixth, which is culture.

I'm going to put those last three in the same.

Beautiful, let's do that, yes.

Because, and it is a little, I mean, it actually is hard from a social science point of view to disaggregate exactly

the percentage of blame for each of those, but culture broadly, I think is the most important.

Having said that, what we argue in the paper, and a lot of people who didn't think they would be convinced by our argument have become convinced of it, is that if you have upstream these cultural trends that you outlined so well, and in 1965, the misnamed war on poverty aggravates that by disincentivizing marriage and at least